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Wednesday, December 21, 2011

BY JEREMIAH CHAMBERLIN

This week’s feature is Debra Allbery’s new poetry collection, Fimbul-Winter. The book was published last year byFour Way Booksand was the recipient of the 2010 Grub Street National Poetry Prize. Allbery is also the author of a previous collection of poems,Walking Distance, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh. New poems are forthcoming in theChronicle of Higher Education, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives near Asheville, NC, and is the Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is also a recent contributor for Fiction Writers Review, writing on the influence that Sherwood Anderson’s life and work had on her development as a young poet.

Like Anderson, Allbery grew up in Clyde, Ohio, the small town that served as the model for Winesburg, Ohio, and the stories in his famed 1919 collection of the same name. In her essay “A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings,” Allbery writes of this place and her childhood:

In many ways, Clyde in the 1960s still resembled the town that Anderson had known (he left it in 1897), a place anchored by a stubborn stasis and insularity which was both comforting and exasperating. The Presbyterian Church’s bell tower was screened in by then (no longer having, if it ever did, the stained glass window Reverend Hartman broke in “The Strength of God”). But the town still had its hitching rails in place along Main Street when I was little, many of the streets were brick (I loved the cobble-cobble of tires passing over them), the dime store its original pressed-tin ceiling. And there was a long-defunct grain elevator in the middle of town, right by the railroad tracks that people had once believed would transform Clyde into a Cleveland or a Columbus.

It wasn’t until Allbery was an adolescent, however, that Anderson and his work entered her awareness. Her father, “a champion reader,” brought home a college literature textbook that he’d picked up at a garage sale. “Red cloth binding and about four inches thick,” she writes, “it included some Anderson’s stories—“I’m a Fool,” “I Want to Know Why,” and “A Death in the Woods.” She continues:

My father pointed out Anderson’s name in the table of contents and said, “This man grew up in Clyde.” It’s difficult to describe the enormity of the impact that had on me then, and thereafter—the possibility it fostered in me, the nascent sense of kinship. “I’m a Fool” and “I Want to Know Why” left me with an empty and unsettled sadness, but “Death in the Woods” felt like a folktale. I was as drawn toward the narrator’s need to tell the story as to the story itself. It would become a kind of touchstone for years; returning to it and reentering it, understanding more of what it had to offer, I began to see it as a barometer of my own growth as a writer, and a measure of how much farther I still had to go.

In her conclusion to this essay, Allbery returns to the place and author who would so fundamentally shape her career, writing:

It’s the Anderson of “Death in the Woods” that feels most like my forebear, my kin—if Melville is Anderson’s grandfather, I’ve long felt that Anderson is mine…Anderson’s fiction, the landscape of his stories, is the place I come from—in the same way that I’d later feel I came, as well, from the worn, industrial landscapes and perspectives of the poems of James Wright, who said, “The spirit of place…isn’t simply image but presence…the genius of place.”

Though perhaps no homage to Anderson is more fitting than Allbery’s poetry itself. Here is Section 4 of “In the Pines,” from Fimbul-Winter, reprinted with permission from Four Way Books:

Death in the Woods

The story is about the storyteller,about getting the telling right.

The narrator is recalling the winterhe and his brother, just boys, found a woman

Thursday, December 15, 2011

A Story Teller’s Story, A Poet’s Beginnings

BY DEBRA ALLBERY

Somewhere in my files is an abandoned poem called “The Three Stories My Mother Told Me about Herself.” My mother not being a storyteller by nature, nor one given to confidences, these were cautionary tales—lessons learned, now presented for my benefit. The first, on the wisdom of doing what you are told, was about the time she was supposed to wait after the picture show for her father to come walk her the three or four miles back to their rural southern Ohio home, because there were gypsies camped in the woods. But my mother, displaying a disobedience, or, at the very least, a daring I never witnessed in her as an adult, struck out boldly on her own. My grandfather, on his way to meet her, saw his daughter coming, hid in the trees and then jumped out to frighten her—to startle her, she said, back into her good common sense.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

The title poem of this exhilaratingly-pitched collection—extraordinarily the first by a writer in his sixties—announces a voice that is not quite like anything we've read anywhere before:

I say it is rain for the rooster. And the fog,

and the dispersion of the small. And I say

it is rain for the sound of despair. For

the clutched breath in a child's dream

when the mare goes blind and licks

a wound. For the light I cannot reach. For

my father is building his boat.

That attunement to the primal and the mythic, coupled with the ability to make wholly familiar words perform unfamiliar tasks or appear in unfamiliar guises, is Jamie Ross's hallmark. There's nothing capricious about his writing, nothing wilful or obscurantist: the making for him is a palpable act of passion, an urge to pressure words into revelation. When the pressure runs white hot, the result is the ecstatic pile-up in the twenty-two line sentence that stunningly takes up most of "Peterbilt." Small wonder Brigit Pegeen Kelly chose this collection as the winner of a US

competition—Ross shares here ambition to re-create the given. Poem for poem, Vinland is as sharp, bright and breath-taking collection as any I've seen in this first decade of the century, brimful of excitement and tranquility alike.

The first word in Rigoberto González’s excellent collection is “strawberries,” followed by a stigmata, and in subsequent pages and poems: a red shirt, ruby heart, a red lake (as the lung of a bottle of cranberry juice), bleeding skulls, and more. It seems red is the dominant color fueling Black Blossoms, an encyclopedia of red, with gray playing second fiddle fusing a vivid succession of phantasmagorical poems with “the sutured centers of ... gray vaginas,” “gray wings/ crushed into exotic fabrics too thin for winter,” elephant trunks, and a lover, whose “skin shades to gray.” A sweep of geographies from Mexico to Madrid, New York to Seattle carry these tightly structured narratives with references as far reaching as Otto Dix and Goya to Lizzie Borden and the Brothers Grimm. Peopled mostly by the stories of women – their struggles, their voices – each poem sings and stings with the dark heart of the familial, often employing the intimate triangulations of mother/father/child as characters mature but never leave their emotional baggage far behind. Betrayal, revenge, abandonment stain like watermarks.

In “Blizzard,” a speaker of unspecified gender, in the back seat of a car, relates to the news of another couple trapped by a storm, who “survived one week on saltine crackers and body heat.” And continues:

Mine is a tube of toothpaste in my bag and a manin town who thanks me for opening my left nipple like a roseat the prompting of his lips. When he turns his back to mein bed his skin shades to gray and I know about the deadwho roll their eyes up to memorize the texture of their graves.If I should freeze to death the muted explosion of my heartwill not betray me. The science of weather will haveits own sad story to tell when I am found, ten-fingeredfetus with a full set of teeth locked to a knucklebone.

In this book, the dead refuse to stay dead. The speakers are often women, as with seven of the poems that comprise the final section of the book. We hear from a mortician’s mother-in-law, his sister, his daughter, his Goddaughter, and step into their complex inner lives. In “The Mortician’s Bride Says I’m Yours,“ a confession:

As I rub my foot with oil I also mourn the painslowly vanishing. It’s one more precious possession gone.Oh the devastating truth of loss, oh mercy. I have beenparting with myself since birth ...

The 30 poems in Black Blossoms offer a sampler of magical realism, muscular syntax, and searing lament. Each voice inhabits gender, class, and historical context with an uncanny authority as the author shifts from poem to poem. Rigoberto González, who is also the author of a memoir, two novels, two bilingual children’s books, and a collection of short stories, is a wordsmith of the first order. He returns to poetry with this third collection, full of biting metaphors and memorable portraits, a singular pleasure to read.

[Published October 11, 2011. 76 pages, $15.95 paperback]Elaine Sexton’s poems and reviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, Pleiades, Oprah Magazine and elsewhere. Her most recent collection is Causeway (New Issues, 2008).

Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, Claire. Bear, Diamonds and Crane. Four Way Bks. ISBN 9781935536130. pap. $15.95.The author explores family, love, and loss, particularly among several generations of Japanese Americans, in beautifully distilled little gems that explore the very limits of poetry—and of life: “Maybe you’ll agree that when you filter,/ you translate. You filter and you lose.” (LJ 11/15/11)

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Train Dance may be a first book… but it is an inaugural collection by a seasoned imagination. With a touch of haunt, a pinch of surrealism, and heaps of good literary taste, Jonathan Wells’ poems pull out of the terminus: “An innocent scull rows, / sixteen knees and elbows, a fraction of a centipede going slow. / I wait there and the train plunges through me” (“The Dream Line”).

Train Dance is divided into four sections. The opening section is a haunted coast through “stations of the night when… the body still tingles with astonishment at what it has and hasn’t kept.” The poems have all of the urban haunt of Cavafy and the slight bitter-sweet melancholy of the well-adjusted immigrant. Two poems are actually comically based; one having to do with a GPS system which renders friendly voice prompts and is named “Ms. Magellan,” and the other having to do with Yoga… dog yoga.

The second section turns to more inhabited poems; the speaker of the poems laying claim to a ticket… a pass that turns out not to be just his ticket to ride the city’s train, but also his ticket in the lottery of the city. Couplets and a villanelle share the sun, city, and Hispanic and Hebrew rhythms of the streets. It is a city chorus of syncopated rhythms and intergenerational and international relationships:

My brother sleeps upstairs on an inflatablemattress (that air was once my breath).

There won’t be time before he leaves atdawn to recall the grapestand under

the stars near Kandahar, or our friend Joe,emerald smuggler or Green Beret, seized at the border

with Iran, shouting, “I’m a Christian” as he wasled away by guards to the barbed wire enclosure.

… A summer squall leaves leaves few traces on the lake:a little air still in the sails, an extra wrinkle in the waves.

(“A Visit”)

Section three moves further out into the geography of relationships. The transports are clear: father, son, grandson. The moonlit landscapes of boulevard trees, buildings, and urban fugues give way to nostalgic sunlight, trees, and Indian summers. The poems look backwards and forwards. The poet wrestling with time and oceans; is immersed in a consuming element:

Come to me. Say my name.The sun made me ten stories tallwhen I walked in the linesof the labyrinth keeper’s rake. One storymade me wiser than I am and I could feelthe geese fly out of me althoughthey barely moved their wings.

(“Please, Hold”)

The final section of the collection moves in closer to the ineffable. Perhaps there is a dash of Yeats, a pinch of Heaney. Clearly, ceremony. There is a sonnet entitled “Speechless.” But what we are coming to is not the other terminus…but the caboose! Train Dance lets us disembark, graced and wanting more.

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Scott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.

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